The negative reactions to Geography and Plays rankled particularly because they rounded off a year widely considered a watershed for modernist literature. In 1922, Willa Cather later declared, “the world broke in two”; Ezra Pound referred to it as “Year One,” reforming the calendar after the publication, in February, of James Joyce’s Ulysses. The first English translation of Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time had followed in September, two months before the author’s death; T. S. Eliot’s poem The Waste Land and Virginia Woolf’s breakthrough novel Jacob’s Room both appeared in October. These works mounted a radical challenge to established forms: in their different ways they each explored how language might match the unfolding of experience, fluidly shifting perspective to offer readers access to characters’ inner lives. These ideas—the workings of consciousness, the nature of perception—were the very preoccupations that had concerned Stein, now, for almost twenty years, and she was frustrated to see others celebrated while her own work was so bitterly derided. She was pleased when a friend told her he had heard Joyce’s close associate Oliver Gogarty read aloud from Stein’s “Portrait of Mabel Dodge” in a crowded Dublin café some years earlier—and chose to believe this indicated Joyce had been influenced by her work. Some critics did acknowledge her precedent—one review of The Waste Land complained that it “seems to us a bad example of the thing that Gertrude Stein did years ago”—but Stein was well aware that a group was forming, of which she wasn’t part.
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